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Comment by carbocation | Hacker News Reader

It's painful because (IMHO) the H index is just a much worse approximation of something that we could actually achieve with PageRank for academic citations. In that case, a bunch of middling papers would be rewarded, but so too would one critical paper that lays a foundation for a field.

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Wouldn't betwenness centrality be better?

Think of an army randomly moving through your citation graph; the more particularly nodes are trampled over, the more pagerank it has.

Now: if this army is informed about the shortest routes and instead moves about optimally, the most-trampled over places have higher betweenness centrality. I'd like my simulated citing scientist to be smart.

I've tried applying PageRank to pubmed with reasonable results, but betweenness does sound compelling. Thanks!

I'll give you a bonus: the Louvain algorithm for community detection. Whatever ships with Networkx, Gephi, etc. doesn't work for my (correlation-derived, pruned with graphical lasso) networks, but the Louvain method (a greedy approximation to modularity maximization; the real math magic is in the concept of modularity and the configuration model) is awesome.

Interesting. We use Louvain for single nucleus sequencing cell type identification. Cool to think about its other applications. Thanks for sharing.

I always thought that PageRank was inspired on methods previously used for scoring academic papers. Now I'm wondering if I misunderstood something, or my professor misunderstood it first. Damn.

PageRank has nothing to do with h-index to my knowledge. The problem with using PageRank-like methods for academic papers is that academic papers mostly reference backwards in time (except for the occasional draft or work-in-progress being referenced, but proper cycles are rare). A triangular matrix doesn't yield an interesting stationary distribution...

You could just make it bidirectional (add the transpose and make it symmetric), right?

Too easy to game by citing the most reputed sources. Reputation shouldn't flow up a citation.

I don't know if it makes any difference, but if PageRank should replace the h-index, the most direct equivalent would be to rank the authors rather than the papers, no?

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